ThursdayFriday
April 29-30, 2004
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Rögnvaldur HannessonProfessor, Nowegian School of Economics and Business AdministrationRights Based Fishing: Use Rights versus Property Rights to Fish |
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The basic economic problem of commercial fisheries can be seen as the absence of property rights to the fish stocks. There are, however, both practical and principle obstacles to applying that solution. Instead, the preferable arrangement appears to be stock control by public agencies, combined with exclusive use rights granted, leased or sold to the fishing industry in order to achieve economic efficiency. Incentives to establish such rights can be found both in government circles and in the industry. Both have a vital role to play; plans to establish use rights such as ITQs have run aground on more than one occasion because of opposition from the industry.
Use rights can be seen as a tool for government agencies to achieve economic efficiency in the industry. If desired, these gains can be distributed over a wider public through user fees of some sort. There are few examples, however, of substantial user fees, and the industry has been successful in getting such schemes abolished if they have been put into effect. The experience of Russia and, in particular, Estonia is discussed. The absence of user fees can be explained by the need to obtain support for use rights schemes from the industry, and the windfall gains from gratis use rights are vehicles for this.
Norway and Iceland have put use rights in place, but they have done so in different ways. Iceland has an ITQ system while Norway has fishing concessions combined with individual vessel quotas. Some success appears to have been achieved in both countries with these systems.
Rögnvaldur Hannesson is a professor of fisheries economics at Norges Handelshøyskole (The Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) in Bergen, Norway. He does research in the areas of resource economics, fisheries economics, and property rights.
Recent work has included conducting a workshop in bioeconomic analysis of fisheries organized by the FAO at the Shanghai University of Fisheries, (December 1995); giving lectures on fisheries economics, Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile (November 2001); writing background papers on fisheries to be used for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg (2002); and doing bioeconomic modeling of the Chilean fisheries (June 2002). He is the research director at the Centre for Fisheries Economics at the Foundation for Research in Economics and Business Administration (SNF), and sits on the Academic Editorial Board of Marine Resource Economics.
He has numerous publications, including two books: Fisheries Mismanagement: The Case of the Atlantic Cod (1996), and Bioeconomic Analysis of Fisheries (1993). A third book, The Privatization of the Oceans, will be published by the MIT Press this year. This book deals with the development of property rights to fish after the Law of the Sea Conference gave the green light for the exclusive economic zone. It specifically discusses the development in Iceland, the USA, Norway, New Zealand, Chile and Canada.
http://www.nhh.no/sam/cv/hannesson-rognvaldur.html
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